An Oregon businessman wanted to get “filthy stinking rich.” Now he’s linked to a bribery case and risks losing his biggest customer: the U.S. Military.

Many successful business owners can’t resist showing off.
They get their name in the newspaper, they donate to local politicians,
or they put a big shiny sign on their offices to build a sense of
identity.

One of Oregon’s most
successful manufacturers does none of these things. It has a signless
white building in an office park in Tualatin. Barbed wire rings the gate
that surrounds its parking lot.

This company is
famous only to the highly trained specialists who use its primary
product, an emergency stretcher that has carried countless wounded
soldiers from battlefields around the world.

The high quality of
this company’s products have made it an industry leader and its owner, a
74-year-old former U.S. Army medic and denturist, a wealthy man.

But the actions of this company, Skedco, and its owner, Carston “Bud” Calkin, have threatened to unravel this success.

Court documents show
Skedco paid $365,000 to a U.S. Defense Department official “in return
for increasing the amount of federal contracts” it received.

Neither
Calkin nor Skedco has been charged with any crime. But a Defense
official is doing time in a federal prison in Englewood, Colo., after a
jury convicted him of 35 counts of bribery, extortion and accepting
illegal gratuities. Evidence presented in the case, and in a related
civil case in Oregon, reveals that Skedco was the source of those
payments.

Now
Skedco, which has received more than $8 million in federal contracts
over the past decade, faces losing access to its biggest customer, the
U.S. Army. Nine weeks ago, the Army put Calkin and others who did
business with the now-imprisoned official on a list of “excluded
parties”—as in, excluded from selling to the federal government.

As WW went to
press, the Army’s Suspension and Debarment Officer had yet to decide
whether to ban Skedco, Calkin and his wife and business partner,
Catherine Calkin, from government contracting.

CALKIN

Whatever the Army’s
decision, the case illustrates the vanishing line between the public and
private sectors throughout the U.S. military, a trend that makes the
$703 billion Defense budget a potential bonanza of corruption.

Conflicts of interest
span the ranks. Some 80 percent of retiring three- and four-star
generals and admirals went on to work as consultants or executives for
Defense contractors, a Boston Globe investigation found last year. In the Beltway, they’re known as “Rent-A-Generals.”

Calls to the Defense
Department’s waste, fraud and abuse hotline have nearly doubled since
October 2002—totaling more than 11,000 in the most recent six-month
reporting period.

But the
congressionally chartered Commission on Wartime Contracting said in its
final report this year that the Pentagon remains far too lenient with
companies accused of wrongdoing. The Army debarred or suspended 281
companies and individuals in the last fiscal year.

Skedco
is the first Oregon company to face an Army debarment since 9/11. This
state has remained largely untainted by contracting scandals in the “war
on terror,” if only because Oregon gets relatively little Defense
spending.

This
unseemly chapter of Skedco’s story might have been as obscure as its
rise to success had another company not drawn a line. The other company,
facing similar threats of extortion, refused to pay bribes and instead
blew the whistle.

Much remains unclear.
Some key court records remain sealed. Few people are talking. Calkin,
reached on his cell phone, referred questions to his attorney. An
attorney for the imprisoned Defense official did not return messages.

But
an intimate look into the case is possible because of two brothers: one,
the ex-Defense official in prison for bribery; the other, a police
officer who witnessed his brother’s slide to ruin. What the police
officer has since disclosed about his brother’s crimes offers a rare
insight into the greed, anger and remorse built into the business of
war.